GOBLIN at The Opera House, Friday (October 11). Rating: NNN
Throwing up metal horns at a Goblin show is an odd thing. The Italian electro-prog band, best known for their soundtrack work on 1970s horror films like Suspiria, Profondo Rosso and Dawn Of The Dead, feels only tangentially connected by metal, mostly through a genealogy of t-shirts.
Broadly speaking, the same kind of person who likes heavy metal is the same kind of person who likes classic zombie and giallo movies, and Goblin creates a space where hardened fans of heavy music can catch themselves unselfconsciously enjoying catchy layered synth lines that veer precariously into straight-up disco.
This iteration of Goblin, technically called “New Goblin” but always only referred to as just “Goblin,” has longtime members Massimo Morante, Claudio Simonetti and Maurizio Guarini reunited for their first-ever North American tour, playing a greatest hits spanning pretty much their whole career: Mad Puppet from the Profono Rosso soundtrack, the themes from Phenomena, Dawn Of The Dead, and Suspiria (accompanied by a whirling ballet dancer).
Most of the crowd-pleasers where stacked towards the end of the set, the sort of thing that tends to trip up a show by having everyone shifting around all, “When are they gonna play Suspiriaaaaaaaaa?” But when it came, Simonetti led the crowd in a round of guttural “la-la-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la”s, and it felt more or less worth the wait.